Dying Read online

  My cousin met me on Rue Mouffetard and I followed him around while he bought the ingredients for dinner. So many cheeses, wines, pastries, charcuterie. So much seafood, all so fresh it gleamed. And so much beauty, in the passing faces, in the sensual language, in the storybook houses winding down the hill. I could barely breathe for happiness. I could have stayed if I’d really wanted to. I was broke, but I could have found work if I’d tried. My cousin taught English, or I suppose there were au pair agencies I might have telephoned. I spoke bad French, but I could have learned the language. In fact, after two or three enchanted days, I went back to Oxford and investigated switching to an undergraduate course in French and Spanish, only to discover it wasn’t possible on my meagre resources. I could have asked my mother for a loan, but she was already in debt because of her divorce. And so I gave up on Paris and came home, imagining another chance might come one day to make my move, to slip into Jeanne’s skin and write my astonishing novels in my 5th arrondissement garret. No such luck. Naturally. But then that turned out to be fortunate, because other opportunities arose soon enough, as they do, and other chances to reinvent myself in ways I could never have predicted.

  The problem with reverie is that you always assume you know how the unlived life turns out. And it is always a better version of the life you’ve actually lived. The other life is more significant and more purposeful. It is impossibly free of setbacks and mishaps. This split between the dream and the reality can be the cause of intense dissatisfaction at times. But I am no longer plagued by restlessness. Now I see the life I’ve lived as the only life, a singularity, saturated with its own oneness. To envy the life of the alternative me, the one who stayed in Paris, or the one who became an expert in the constitutional history of New South Wales, seems like the purest kind of folly.

  No, I don’t believe in an afterlife. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes sums it up for me. We come from nothingness and return to nothingness when we die. That is one meaning of the circle beloved of calligraphers in Japan, just a big bold stroke, starting at the beginning and travelling back to it in a round sweep. In my beginning is my end says T. S. Eliot. Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth/Which is already flesh, fur and faeces/Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. When I first read Four Quartets at school it was like a revelation. The world was just as he described it and no other way, a place where beauty and corruption cohabit and are often indistinguishable.

  When the Buddhist nun who sometimes visits me asked me if I believed in an afterlife I said I thought we are only remembered for so long, by the people who knew us, and that after friends and family are gone we’re forgotten. I told her about the cemeteries in the Japanese porcelain town Arita, where my husband and I have bought a house. The town officially dates back four hundred years, but presumably there were farmers there before the potters arrived. Way past its heyday, Arita is now host to far more dead than living inhabitants, so that whatever route you take through its narrow, winding streets you soon come upon graveyards packed with monuments to the deceased. It’s easy to tell which of them are remembered, because some graves are beautifully kept and often visited. It’s just as easy to tell which of the dead have been completely forgotten, as their graves are crumbling and overgrown with weeds. In some corners you’ll even find memorial stones jumbled together willynilly, unceremoniously sidelined to make space for newcomers.

  I told the nun that Shin, a painter, had decided to move to Arita because he liked the idea of painting on porcelain instead of on perishable materials like paper or canvas. Arita is littered with porcelain shards everywhere you look. All around the old kiln sites you pick up bits of blue and white porcelain plates, cups, teapots. The bed of the river that runs through the town is layered with discarded bits of porcelain, pieces of pots that cracked in the firing or were found wanting in some other way and were simply flung out the windows of the workshops into the water. Shin likes to imagine that four hundred years from now shards of his work might be unearthed and collected by some curious traveller, just as he likes to unearth and collect fragments of work painted by his predecessors. In that way, he says, he will have achieved a degree of immortality. I say that I feel the same way about my work. I like to think that, long after I’m gone, someone somewhere might read a book or essay of mine in a last remaining library or digital archive and be touched in some way.

  The nun listens politely to my theories of the afterlife but I can tell she doesn’t agree with me. I get the feeling that for her things are not as simple as I describe them. I don’t pretend to understand her belief system but I imagine it assumes the existence of another place, separate from this one. What else can she mean when she describes the essential spirit departing the body for the ‘ether’? This is where religion gets too cryptic for me, or maybe it’s just that language is inadequate to describe the indescribable.

  I’m much more drawn to all of the ordinary ways in which we cheat death. It might be through the evocative power of the objects we leave behind, or it might be in a form of words, a turn of the head, a way of laughing. I was sitting at dinner the other night with some very old friends of ours. They’d met my mother many times, back when she was still herself, before she became ill. The wife looked hard at me for a while.

  ‘You get more and more like her,’ she said.

  It felt for a moment as if my mother had joined us, that us all being together had conjured up her presence at the table. It was only a fleeting thing. But then I can’t imagine an afterlife that consists of anything more than these brief and occasional visits with the living, these memories that come unbidden and out of nowhere, then vanish again into oblivion.

  No, my priorities remain the same. Work and family. Nothing else has ever really mattered to me. It might sound odd for a writer with my small output to claim that work has been a lifelong preoccupation, but it’s true. When I wasn’t actually writing I was preparing to write, rehearsing ideas, reading, observing life and character, learning from other writers. As Nora Ephron always said, everything is copy. If I was slower than some at finding success, it isn’t because I wasn’t trying. I was trying and failing all the time. That’s what I’m doing now and I hope failing better. I’ve put off using my death as material for a long time, mainly because I couldn’t find the right tone. I’m not even sure I’ve found it now.

  To say that family has been my other chief priority in life is to understate the case. Marriage, children, the whole catastrophe as Zorba called it. To become a mother is to die to oneself in some essential way. After I had children I was no longer an individual separate from other individuals. I leaked into everyone else. I remember going to a movie soon after Nat was born and walking out at the first hint of violence. It was unbearable to think of the damage done. I had never been squeamish in my life before, but now a great deal more was at stake. I had delivered a baby into the world. From now on my only job was to protect and nurture him into adulthood, no matter what it cost me. This wasn’t a choice. It was a law.

  That makes it sound like a selfless task, but it wasn’t. I got as much as I gave, and much more. The ordinary pleasures of raising children are not often talked about, because they are unspectacular and leave no lasting trace, but they sustained me for years as our boys grew and flourished, and they continue to sustain me now. I can’t help but take pleasure in the fact that my children are thriving as I decline. It seems only fitting, a sure sign that my job in the world is done. It’s like the day Dan, then in the fourth grade, turned to me twenty yards from the school gate and said, ‘You can go now, Mum.’ I knew then that the days of our companionable walks were over, and that as time went by there would be further signs of my superfluity, just as poignant and necessary as this one.

  No, I am not unhappy or depressed, but I am occasionally angry.

  Why me? Why now? Dumb questions but that doesn’t stop me from asking them. I was supposed to defy the statistics and beat this disease through sheer willpower. I was supposed to have an e
xtra decade in which to write my best work. I was robbed!

  Crazy stuff. As if any of us are in control of anything. Far better for me to accept that I am powerless over my fate, and that for once in my life I am free of the tyranny of choice. That way I waste a lot less time feeling singled out or cheated.

  As I told the young psychologist, I rely on friends to divert me from dark thoughts. I don’t have a lot of friends, but the ones I do have are so good to me, so tender and solicitous, it would seem ungrateful to subside into unhappiness or depression. And then there’s Shin, without whom I’d be lost. He’s been so good-humoured and loving; I owe him no less than my sanity. If I’m ever depressed or unhappy, I hide the fact from him as best I can. It’s the least I can do.

  No, I’m not likely to take more risks in life, now that I know I’m dying. I’m not about to tackle skydiving or paragliding. I’ve always been physically cautious, preternaturally aware of all the things that can go wrong when one is undertaking a dangerous activity. Paradoxically, it was Dad who taught me to be careful. I don’t think he was temperamentally suited to flying; the risks played unhealthily on his mind and made him fearful, tetchy, depressed. At the same time he was addicted to the thrill of flying and couldn’t give it up.

  His ambivalence about danger confused me while I was growing up. He never discouraged me from taking up risky activities; instead he filled me with fear about the possible consequences, with the result that I was never any good at them. When he taught me to drive, he made sure to emphasise the fallibility of the machine, something he would have learned during the war at flying school, where mistakes could be fatal. He liked to open the bonnet of the car before we set off, and run through a sort of flight check with me to make sure everything was hooked up to everything else. These were good lessons and they’ve served me well, but I wonder if a certain enthusiasm for risk drained out of me as a result of his teaching methods, and whether that wasn’t his intent. It strikes me that I might have turned out differently if he’d taken me for a spin one day in one of the Tiger Moths he loved so much, shown me what had turned him on to flying in the first place, emphasised the mad joy rather than the danger.

  The irony is that, despite my never having tempted death the way daredevils do, I’m dying anyway. Perhaps it is a mistake to be so cautious. I sometimes think this is the true reason for my reluctance to take my own life. It is because suicide is so dangerous.

  I shall miss you so much when I’m dead: Harold Pinter, dying of cancer, speaking of his wife. I know exactly what he means.

  The short answer to the question of what I’ll miss the most is Shin, my husband of thirty-one years, and the faces of my children.

  The long answer is the world and everything in it: wind, sun, rain, snow and all the rest.

  And I will miss being around to see what happens next, how things turn out, whether my children’s lives will prove as lucky as my own.

  But I will not miss dying. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I will be glad when it’s over.

  I’d like to be remembered by what I’ve written. As somebody once warned, if you don’t tell your own story, someone else will.

  But I know I have no real say in how I will be remembered. It is in the nature of memory that different people will remember different things, and that none of what they remember will be verifiable or true. This is the case even in my own recollections about my life, which are porous and mutable and open to contradictory interpretations. If I use them in my work, which I often do, it is to fit them into a particular narrative, to shape them to a purpose, because that is how fiction is made. In the process, I become convinced that the fictional version of my memory is the real version, or at least preferable to it. It is a thoroughly self-serving exercise, I know, but that is part of its attraction.

  In the end it is a blessing to be remembered at all, and we should not worry too much about how or why. My grandmother on my mother’s side died before I got to know her. But I remember her as a talented woman with literary aspirations, who died too young to fulfil her potential—because that’s what I heard so often from my mother. The point of the story was not lost on me. It was a cautionary tale, and it haunted me, as it haunted Mum. But to my mind it was also a romantic story, especially in the detail. My grandmother was a country girl from Longreach, in outback Queensland. When she was scarcely out of school, she married a grazier twelve years her senior. She wrote bush poetry that was published in the Bulletin, but her real wish was to escape to the city, to meet with other writers and be part of a literary scene. Her chance didn’t come until she was sixty. Newly widowed, she bought herself an apartment at the Macleay Regis in Kings Cross, in the heart of bohemian Sydney. A week or so after moving in she died in her sleep. A sad end, of course, but what impressed me was the strength of her ambition—she had nursed it for so long and against such odds. And I admired the fact that she took writing seriously, which gave me permission to do the same, to protect my own little flame of ambition as soon as it flared up in high school.

  Without my grandmother’s example, who knows what might have become of me? I might have dismissed poetry as a waste of time and concentrated on my science classes. As it was, a part of me always believed that I was honouring my grandmother’s memory by choosing writing as a profession, that I was finishing something she had started, or at least taking up the baton. I know she is not aware of it, but I’m still persuaded she would be pleased to think that this is how she is remembered. In that way, too, she is a pioneer, gone ahead of me into the great bohemia in the ether.

  I am the youngest of three children. My sister Sarah is six years older than I am, and my brother Eliot four years older. I have the impression that I was a surprise, if not a mistake. According to my mother, when she announced that she was pregnant for the third time, my grandmother shook her head in disbelief. ‘You stupid girl,’ she said, rightly worried about the state of my parents’ marriage. For some reason, this story always made my mother laugh. I couldn’t see the joke; maybe you had to have been there.

  From time to time as we were growing up my mother would take Sarah and Eliot and me out to the place where she was born. We went in the winter school holidays, from Sydney, and later from Canberra. It was two or three days by car, up through New South Wales, and across the border into Queensland, the towns growing sparser and dustier the further we drove, the horizon flattening, the sky overhead broadening until there was so much of it your eyes ached from staring.

  The pattern of our visits was always the same. We stayed with my mother’s youngest sister Jenny and her husband Ranald. They lived on North Delta, a sheep and cattle property near Barcaldine that had belonged to my grandfather Norman Murray. The country there was ochre, scrubby, and we approached it along a rutted road that my mother navigated gingerly because of the bull dust. I could tell she was scared as soon as she turned off the bitumen. She gripped the wheel and narrowed her gaze to a few feet ahead, expecting us to strike disaster at any moment. The bush wasn’t her natural element. She might have been born there, but after years of exile she had become suburban and cautious.

  At the end of such a long journey the homestead was always a joyous sight, set in a clearing surrounded by rough-hewn fences. We drove in from the back, passing the machinery shed and the chicken coops and the pigsty and the tethered dogs along the way. The verandahs were pitched wide and low, so from a distance the house appeared to be all red roof. Once you had come in through the kitchen door, you immediately saw the point of this arrangement. It meant the sun was barred entry, and inside was kept dark and shadowy as a cave.

  There was no real logic to the design of Delta. Beyond the kitchen was a breakfast room, really just a screened section of the verandah, and beyond that a warren of rooms that had been added or partitioned over time to accommodate Jenny and Ranald and their four sons. Jenny would lead us through the rooms, allocating beds as she went, then serve us tea at the front of the house, where the verandah
was at its widest and overlooked a lawn and a swimming pool.

  It was here that the talk took place and all the stories were told. It was here that I learned where my mother had come from and why she carried such a burden of sadness. Not that this was much in evidence, for generally she was a person who liked to laugh and enjoy life, but underneath her vibrancy there was another strain, a sort of indelible grief that no amount of good cheer could dislodge. And this grief, it soon became clear, had originated in her Queensland childhood, to which she felt compelled to return periodically, with us in tow as her excuse.

  It is notable that our father rarely came with us on these trips. Often, in the early days, he was away flying somewhere, but later he didn’t come because my mother preferred to travel without him. There was a lot of talk on the verandah about Mum’s hasty marriage to the handsome pilot she had met in a bar, and about how, in the intervening years, things had gone so disastrously wrong. I listened to these tales with extra attention. My father had told me so little about himself, and it was rare to hear from people like Jenny and Ranald who had known him since the start, so I took note, my writer’s instincts already awakened, piecing together, guessing, inventing, trying to figure out what it all meant. My brother and sister preferred to be out on the horses with my cousins, but I was a reluctant rider and happier to sit astride a squatter’s chair scoffing teacakes and soaking up the family legends.

  I liked Jenny and Ranald. They were kind and funny. Every morning the giant AGA stove in the kitchen was fired up and spitting by daybreak. Ranald was the breakfast cook, frying up huge quantities of lambs fry, bacon, onions, eggs, first for the working men, who had to be away early, and then for us layabouts, who came to the table still sleepy at eight.